It’s a solid defense, since the lawsuit’s about the sharing of the books. The metadata of the torrents isn’t part of the relevant IP, and how they used the content they downloaded is a separate issue.

That’s what I thought. I don’t think their defense succeeding here really gets us anything new.

Has anyone in the US ever been busted for downloading from a direct download portal? Or usenet?

I think any progress here is mostly in principle, as I don’t think there’s a big practical risk to downloading only as it stands today, though I don’t follow things as closely as I used to and could be mistaken.

Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, admitted in court that he downloaded and distributed 30 songs.

Your example is exactly why meta didn’t seed.

Tidal-DL could rip Tidal tracks pretty reliably when I last used it. I ditched my Tidal sub when they split with Plex, so haven’t used it in 6 months or so. I know Spotify has lower quality, but I’ve got a .edu email so was able to subscribe for cheap. I mostly use it for music discovery, so actually listening to and ripping music from it is fairly rare.

Spotify rippers (they come and go like waves on a beach)

Real ones? Seems like most of them use Spotify to identify music then rip from elsewhere like youtube.

I use Zotify when I get to the “rip from Spotify” level, but would be happy to add another couple options if there’s more solid ones out there.

What are the odds there’s at least one reddit employee’s IP on the list?

To add to this, Bitwarden integrates with a few of them so you can automatically generate a unique email on the fly when creating an entry for a site. (docs link)

I use Fastmail and use my own domain for about 90% of stuff. Sites I don’t even want to have my domain get a random.gibberish@fastmail.com email autogenerated from the BW extension. It’s pretty convenient once all setup.

For literal one-time use, I’ve generally had good luck with 10minutemail. I’m not sure how much it gets flagged as spam right away these days, but the nice thing about it being free is you can always try and find out for a particular site.

I use Fastmail with my own domain. Not free, but worth it given how much I rely on my email/calendar. There’s a 30-day free trial before committing though, so you can kick the tires before deciding.

Specifically, try searching by ISBN (0684839563)

Fair enough, but it’s a good value for the price. Mullvad’s €5/month, and while it’s fallen out of favor I know people who still use PIA and get it for close to $2/month by prepaying for a few years at a time. You could probably pay for it by turning off the laptop a few hours a day to save on electricity.

Worth the price, imo.

What’s the argument for doing this? It looks like media stack includes a vpn, so the effort level isn’t going to be all that different.

Echoing everyone else: definitely use a vpn if you’re torrenting. Strongly consider using a seedbox if you’re on starlink or anything else with poor upload speeds.